We finished rolling out Facebook Chat today. Along with this, we're excited to announce an important related feature -- real-time notifications. Just as users can communicate in real time with Facebook Chat, users who are on Facebook will now receive notifications as soon as they are sent. Whether it's to announce the giving of a gift, the challenging to a game, or the joining of a cause, your applications' notifications will make a more instant impact. We encourage you to think about new ways to integrate with Facebook when you send notifications.

In order to call users' attention to the notifications, we've added a notification pop-up window to the Chat bar in the lower right corner of the browser window. From there they can interact with the notifications and choose to see all of them.

We realize this change requires a learning period for our users. During this time some of them might not respond to notifications as they did before. To offset this, we're working on ways to introduce users to the new notifications interface.

This is only just the beginning. Because we've added a new interface, this also means there are more integration points that your applications can hook into. We welcome your thoughts on what new integration points you'd like to see (for instance, since notifications appear right next to Facebook Chat, maybe you'd want a link in a notification to initiate a chat session). Please send your thoughts as well as any other comments, questions, or feedback, to developer-feedback@facebook.com. Put [real-time notifications] in the subject line.